Last Notes from Home (12 page)
Read Last Notes from Home Online
Authors: Frederick Exley
Although she wore no makeup and her long, naturally blond hair fell rather casually, even sloppily, over her shoulders, there was no mistaking the beauty of her facial structure or disguising the strikingly tanned figure beneath her elegantly custom-cut gray slacks and off-white blouse. Like so many people of old wealth she was devoid of ostentation and wore no jewelry save for a simple engagement ring and wedding band, both of white gold. She was drinking a John Collins. On the other hand, he wore loafers without socks, dusty khaki pants, and an equally dusty faded denim shirt completely unbuttoned. Sweat ran down his tanned, muscular chest and taut stomach past his beltline and into his trousers. Obviously he was building something around Lahaina and had just come from the construction site. In the manner of his laborers, he hurriedly drank three beers from the bottle. The sweat dried, he refused to have lunch with his lovely bride as—I think I heard him say—”we’re pouring piling” and, kissing her with genuine affection, he left her to order another John Collins and a roast beef sandwich. On his way out he called back to the bartender and told him to put everything on his tab, the company’s, not his personal one. He also told the guy to write himself in a five-buck tip. We did not look anything alike but, save for his build being muscular while mine ran to sedentary flab, we were both five-ten and weighed about 180 and I suddenly understood where all Robin’s gifts to me had come from, aloha shirts, V-necked yachting and tennis sweaters, khaki, denim and Bermuda slacks, socks, sandals, deck shoes. She had bought them for him and after banging her he’d departed without even remembering to take them with him. I don’t know that I’d have bothered either. After his departure I spent a lot of time staring at his wife. For all of me she could have been the biggest bitch in Christendom but she gave off class the way boxers give us the lilt in their walks.
Over the years Robin has tried repeatedly to convince me, but mainly herself, that by fornicating on his houseboat we were not only in dire physical danger—”With his connections in these islands he’d probably have us both killed!”—but that she was jeopardizing her entire future right at that moment he was on the verge of divorcing his wife and marrying Robin. When he unexpectedly showed up on the houseboat, according to Robin, he demanded that she be there and if he ever caught her with another man—Robin leveled her joined index and middle fingers at me, made what she imagined were the reports of an army-issue .45-caliber sidearm but which sounded more like a sneezing fit,
cahcheeew, cahcheeew, cahcheeew,
then raised her two joined fingers up and feigned a gory slashing of her lovely throat. All this was manifestly ridiculous. If Robin were lucky, he came to the houseboat twice a month, more often than not only once, and on these occasions he telephoned her two or three days in advance to give her his anticipated arrival time. He knew his mistress all too well. Besides the houseboat and a Master Charge for groceries and whatever else she needed (that card, too, was in his company’s name), he had bought her a sun-yellow Porsche and had presented her with credit cards to Liberty House and two expensive boutiques along Kalakaua. On the consummation of our first violent copulation, which took place within twenty-four hours after she’d hissed at me her “rotten
esss
oooh
beee
” high above the imperially azure Pacific, violent in only the way the specter of the Brigadier’s imminent death could make it violent, Robin leaped instantly from the bed, pranced to the dresser, picked up a brush, and with furious jerkiness began brushing her hair, as she did so studying herself with incredible intentness in the dresser’s mirror. When I started to light a cigarette, she demanded I abandon it, rise, walk to her, stand behind her, put my arms around her waist, and by thrusting my chin over her right shoulder place my cheek against hers and study her image in the mirror with the very intentness she was studying herself.
“See what you did to me?” she demanded. “See what you did!” I did not see. “The color, the flush in my cheeks. You did that! Who needs makeup after a screw like that?”
Assuming that was meant as a compliment, I summoned up an appropriate modesty and said, “Well, you helped, too, you know?”
“No, you did it! You!”
As it turned out, Ms. Robin Glenn never did anything to herself. People did things to her. Like a dozen other women I have known, Robin had this laughably preposterous need to convince her lovers that if they weren’t getting a virgin—as they most certainly weren’t—they were staking out unique claims to all sorts of firsts “inflicted” upon her body. No matter that Robin could wet her pants by just dancing solo around the living area of the houseboat listening to Andy Williams sing “Didn’t We?” on the stereo, I was the first man who ever made Robin “come” (Jesus, gang, it’s time to go pop a can of Genesee Light on that one). Although Robin had never been into oral intercourse since those unbearable, nightmarish days with Dick Brophy up at the University of New Hampshire, naturally my semen was the first she’d ever taken into herself and fed upon. On the first occasion I had anal intercourse with Robin, her comment on its consummation was that it was not only another “first” but that “I knew that you absolutely had to do that to me and get it out of your system,” no matter that Robin had brought me to erection orally, then with all the aplomb of a diagnostician looking for rectal trouble and preparing to shove that ghastly looking proctoscope into one, had reached into the drawer of her bedstand, had brought out a tube of K-Y Jelly, as though she had no doubt that that universal balm of the gay world had reached such ubiquity that it was to be found in the nightstands of every bedroom in the republic, had lathered me up, and had directed me in.
When I came from the shower the next morning, I found a bikini panty-clad Robin cooking her idea of breakfast, two hamburgers on toasted English muffins loaded with pickle relish, to be washed down with Cokes. Expecting affection or a show of warmth for our nightly labors, I found instead a Robin on the attack, eyes flashing.
“Jesus, Frederick, if you ever have to do that disgusting thing to me again, you’ll have to use prophylactics.” I liked the delicacy of “prophylactics.” “When I walked naked into the galley this morning, ail your rotten icky muck plopped out of me right onto the goddamn floor. I almost puked cleaning it up. Why do you have to do such crummy things to me? Why, why,
why?”
Within two days, frantically searching for a pencil to do the Sunday crossword puzzle, I had occasion to look into Robin’s nightstand and discovered next to her tube of K-Y Jelly, if not an orange crate, enough condoms to have anal intercourse three times a day for the next six months. Apparently Robin had come a long way from the timid little girl who had let the ballsy Ms. Priscilla Saunders perform such sleazy pilgrimages to the drugstore. Men did things to Ms. Robin Glenn. On the Sunday she buried the steak-grilling fork in my chest, within an hour after she’d done so she’d convinced herself beyond all doubt that I’d also done that to myself simply to hurt and spite her. But that is enough of Robin for the moment. She is to occupy a much larger place in these notes than it makes me easy to contemplate. After my return to Alexandria Bay I would hear from her very often but never by mail. I made the mistake of telling her that tomorrow was spelled with one “m” and not “tommorrow” as she had spelled it in a letter. The last words she ever put on paper were on a postcard reading, “Go f. yourself! You snobbish so-called intellectual P k!” What they made of that card in our quaint and proper little village post office I don’t even like to imagine.
For a time Robin’s messages were conveyed to me by phone and received about six in the morning. It was midnight her time and invariably she was slightly in her cups. Three months after I met her standing statuesquely and hauntingly above me as I was seated in a 707 on a Chicago runway waiting to pick up some passengers from Toronto so we could proceed to Honolulu and the Brigadier’s death-watch, American Airlines discontinued its Hawaii flights, and as I understand it all personnel, save for some senior captains who would have to deadhead back to the mainland to connect with their flights, were forced either to return to the mainland city in which their flights originated or to resign. Robin resigned. From tidbits she’s dropped over the months, both when I’ve been there and during these drunken erratic calls, I gather her “fianc6” has given her the title to the lovely houseboat, ironically named
Cirrhosis of the River,
ironical in the sense that I doubt that there’s a river on Oahu wide enough for it to navigate upon or that he drinks enough to come up with a name like that. Robin, however, claims he can go through a quart of Tanqueray gin between six in the evening and midnight, which did not at all coincide with that three-beer virile construction boss I’d seen at Drysdale’s bar in Lahaina.
13
Robin still had the sun-yellow Porsche, a new one at that, the credit cards, and so forth and she would tell me she was working but the job varied with each telling. At one time she’d be managing one of those expensive boutiques where she used to charge hand-wrought leather belts, at another time she was the hostess at the Monarch Room of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, at still another she was lifeguard at the pool of the Kahala Hilton where she has become chums with Debbie Reynolds, Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Jack E. Leonard, and Joan Didion who, Robin gloatingly didn’t hesitate to tell me, “thinks you’re a lousy writer!” Whenever I was in Hawaii, and though I spent some of my time with Wiley and Malia who had moved to the island of Lanai, twenty-five air minutes from Honolulu, Robin always seemed to be on vacation from her job. From what I’d guessed and pieced together her fiance spent less and less time aboard the
Cirrhosis of the River
but his business acquaintances passed all kinds of time there for much more negotiable pieces of paper than credit cards. Robin has never admitted to me that she was hooking but at the gut level I knew that she was. There is a very nice restaurant and lounge fronting the marina and once when Robin and I were leaving there I distinctly heard this exchange between the bartender and a waitress: “I’d give a month’s salary for just about ten minutes with that.” The waitress replied, “It’d cost you more than a month’s salary for ten minutes with that.” When I got back aboard, I poured myself a triple vodka and grapefruit juice, drank it in one gulp, walked immediately to the head, and threw up.
Taking Robin’s calls at six in the morning was a distressing, humorous, frightening, crazy, somewhat terrifying experience. She was not only invariably tipsy, she was sobbing so heartrendingly that for the first three or four minutes I was unable to make out anything she said but what a no-good nothing slob of a tramp she was. I’d spend those minutes listening to this awesome self-flagellation, interrupting when I could to assure and reassure her what a lovely, loving, generous, sensitive, intelligent, and altogether stunning young woman she was. If this was so, why didn’t I come to Hawaii? Because I hadn’t any money. Robin had enough money for two. Within three days there would be a first class plane ticket in the mail. I didn’t like the idea of having to move out of the houseboat on the frequent nights her “fianc6” came over. Why didn’t I get a job like everyone else and then I’d be able to have my own place? I was never going to finish my book anyway. “Even if you do, it’ll be a bunch of shit like the other two.” This hurt. I held my peace. Did I love her? Would I say it? Yes.
Now then, this is the way it always ended. What am I doing now? I’m waiting for her to hang up so I can urinate, make a cup of tea, and do some scribbling on the shitty book I’m never going to finish. Do I ever think of her? Yes. In what way? In all kinds of ways. Am I alone? Yes. Will I do “that” to myself and think of her while I’m thus engaged? Robin will do the same thing and it’ll be as though we are together. Once she asked me to call her when I’d finished to see if it had “happened” at the same time. That was too expensive. All right, Robin would call me. “You cheap bastard!” I’d had just enough time to micturate and get the teakettle humming nicely when the phone rang. I laughed. “Jesus, that was quick.”
“You prick! You once accused me of being the horniest broad in the Western Hemisphere. But see how basically shy and retiring I am? How quickly I can bring it off when “I’m by myself? You really are a prick, you know that, don’t you Frederick?”
Did I ever participate in this absurd ritualistic auto-erotic surrogate copulation with a partner five thousand miles away? Does it make any difference? In all the sad and illusory, the laughable and perspicacious, the unbearable and joyous days of my life, I was yet addressing myself to love.
PART TWO
Interment and
New Beginnings
1
Listen, Marshal Dillon, I suspect I’ve bent your ear quite enough, but please believe me when I say that I am in no way up to this ceremony and have neither the character, strength, nor will to get through this interment without your aid. I realize that my saying I was certain I’d like you as a man hardly gives me the right to demand you reciprocate my affection, so if you feel you’d like to prop your size-thirteen boots up on your desk, lean back in your chair, push that ten-gallon baby over your grizzled face and catch a little shut-eye, please feel free to do so. Ironically, the Brigadier’s fifteen-year-old son, Scott, is into his Rock period, as Picasso was into his Blue. His sun-bleached hair, worn in a ponytail, is down to the small of his back, and realizing how out of place he’d be in this oppressive milieu, he absolutely refused to attend. This of course infuriated me, as I’m sure it would have you, Matt, for I could only visualize him thirty years hence, stuck between flights at a bar in the San Antonio Airport, pensively sipping his drink and excoriating himself for not having gone to his father’s funeral. In other words, Jim, I didn’t want to see him set himself up for the kind of remorse none of us needs in middle age.
But now, staring across the Brigadier’s bier at the seven-man honor guard, their rifles at port rest, I understand Scott’s decision completely, as I’m sure his father would have, and know he did the right thing by staying away. Whether the guard is from the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division (James Jones’s outfit) or Fort Shafter, I don’t know, marshal, but from their vacant-eyed mute rigidity, I would suspect they had all spent one too many days in the line in Nam. As we are the only family represented, the old lady is standing between my sister-in-law, Judy, and me in the front row; in the row directly behind us I’ve spotted a couple of one-stars, the rest of the row being made up of guys holding the Brigadier’s rank of bird colonel and in the rows behind them, in the very stylized and hierarchical way of the military, light colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, warrant officers, sergeants, and so forth, respectively, entirely too much brass for the honor guard and for me.
Sweating under their field helmets, their necks encased in white silk scarfs worn like ascots, the honor guards stare so unseeingly I suspect that though laymen might view this as cushy duty, one or two of these guys—especially the one who, doubtless having sensed my own abundant discomfort, stares so eerily at me—would prefer being back in the line in Nam, killing Cong.
Robin is not here, the selfish bitch, having explained that she cannot “abide dead people.” In the week I’ve been here I’ve become terribly smitten with her, as smitten, Big Jim, as I guess I’ve ever been. And though in fairness to her she told me repeatedly she wouldn’t come, and in fact I never asked her to come and can in no way articulate any obligation on her part to do so, I yet had hoped she might. James Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey, accompanied by this monstrous Samoan dude, Hannibal I believe O’Twoomey called him, a guy O’Twoomey claims to use as a bodyguard when he’s in the islands, is here. Astonishingly, my best friend from Alexandria Bay, Toby Farquarson III, is also here. When I decamped from the funeral limousine and was making my way across the beautifully cropped grass of Punchbowl toward the bier, I had a chance to speak briefly with both of them. O’Twoomey told me he’d read the Brigadier’s obituary in
The Honolulu Advertiser,
and as Exley wasn’t that common a name he’d made the association with me immediately and had decided to do me the courtesy—”don’t you know, lurve?”—of attending. Four days after I’d left the Bay with the old lady, Toby decided that as he’d never seen Hawaii, the Brigadier’s death, though he hadn’t known Bill, was as provoking an occasion as any for coming over. And of course my childhood friend, Wiley Hampson, and his wife, Malia, with whom I spent the past week’s deathwatch, are here, all standing awkwardly back there behind me in one place or another, like characters waiting to be introduced into a novel. Wiley, Big Jim, is so very much family that he and his wife could as well be standing up here in the front row with us, to help leaven the oppressiveness as it were. The Brigadier would, I know, have very much liked Wiley to be in the family place.